William Shatner: Has Been

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * )

Captain Kirk beams down to planet pop for the second time in 36 years for an album of high warp factor

If you thought William Shatner was bit of a ham as an actor, then you should hear him sing. Well, not so much sing as enunciate, declare and muse out loud. Once he's up and running it's like the bastard child of Leonard Cohen and Homer Simpson.

But this isn't the first time. That was The Transformed Man, his 1968 album on which he covered Mr Tambourine Man, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and other tracks in between bits of Hamlet, King Henry V and Romeo and Juliet. It's often nominated as the worst album ever. But at least it's remembered, and it did spring from a time when Richard Harris was mumbling about cakes left out in the rain in MacArthur Park and Peter Sellers had turned A Hard Day's Night into a Shakespearean soliloquy. So it's not as eccentric as all that, really. This new one is, though.

There is no Bard this time round. Just a collection of covers and comedy songs produced by Ben Folds, who as the leader of the Ben Folds Five tried to outdo everyone in the ironic rockwit stakes in the late 90s.

Most of the tracks are Folds-Shatner co-writes spiced with one notable cover in Pulp's Common People and a couple of guest spots. Joe Jackson turns up to help out on the high notes on Common People, Aimee Mann assists on That's Me Trying, and Henry Rollins trades lines with Shatner on the hilarious complaints department of a song that is I Can't Get Behind That.

The jokes aren't all in Shatner's earnest line readings - the words are funny in a black kind of way too. That's Me Trying, co-written by Nick Hornby, has its narrator as long-lost father trying to negotiate his way back into his adult daughter's life ("But I don't want to talk about any of that bad stuff/Why I missed out on your wedding and your high school graduation"). You'll Have Time offers wise advice ("Live life like you're gonna die/ because you are").

And it briefly stops being a piano-led rock cabaret on the airy swish of Together, which comes with the backing of ambient-Brits Lemon Jelly, while the title track is the best spaghetti western-backed declaration of self by a former sci-fi TV star, probably ever.

Yes, it's very silly and it is certainly Shatner's best album yet.

But you wouldn't want him to ruin it by being in a hurry to do another one.

Label: Sony